Lau Lau

Our visionist leader Smiley Burrows

Today I joined the Green Lake Gardening crew in harvesting taro and making laulau.   Laulau (literally means leaf leaf in Hawaiian) is meat or fish and sometimes with hunks of sweet potato wrapped in taro leaves and baked in an umu.  I learned that umu is the Hawaiian method of cooking above ground using heated lava rocks and banana and ti leaves for steaming as opposed to the below ground imu that is used for cooking kalua pig at a luau.

This small group of Kapoho neighbors have been meeting regularly since November, when they planted their “lava flow” garden (see my earlier posts for details about the lava flow).  

Prepping taro leaves

This community garden is a step towards Kapoho’s sustainability in preparing for a future crisis in which we might become cut off from mainland or even inter-island food sources.   This  group has become a small community within the larger community of Kapoho.  I’ve known most of these people for years by acquaintance, walking their dogs or riding by my house on bikes, but after spending just a few hours bound together by a common goal, I felt a deeper connection to them and also euphoric.

The Green Lake and Green Mountain property is heaven on earth beautiful and Smiley’s husband Gerald gave us a gift by sharing his culture.  As I harvested taro leaves I was thinking of the stuffed cabbage I make from a recipe passed down to my mother by my Hungarian grandmother.   How cool it was to harvest the leaves we would be “stuffing” and cooking the little lau lau in an oven made of rocks and sticks also from the property.  Smiley, who has embraced the Hawaiian culture of her husband, had only made lau lau in this matter once herself and by repeating the process, can now pass the recipe and the process down to her children when they’re ready.

Mahalo Gerald and Smiley for bringing so much to our community!

Ono!